Of course, the competition represents only one part of your business you need to keep an eye on. Just as important is keeping a healthy bottom line. As the economy has gone sour over the last couple of years, lots of business owners and marketers have decided to cut back on their web investments. Some did this as a matter of planning; for others, it was a stark necessity. As things continue to pick up, however, you’re going to want to be sure you’re doing all you need to do in order to bring in new sales and customers. Here are four things to consider adding to your business site, if you haven’t already:

1. Links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on.

Social networking isn’t just a newer way to find customers – it’s a different way of interacting with them altogether. But you’re not going to enjoy any of the benefits (like stronger relationships, bigger account values, and increased referrals) if no one ever finds your profile. That’s why it’s so important that you place links to your information at these sites on your home page, and possibly other places. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find you.

Another reason to take this step, like many on this list, is because visitors expect it. They’ve become accustomed to communicating with friends, colleagues, and vendors in social networking formats, and so if you aren’t there, they might wonder whether your business is staying up with new ideas and processes.

2. Video.

The recent increase in availability of high-speed Internet service, not to mention the lowering prices, has meant that online videos have become more cost-effective than they were just a few years ago. While video used to chew up too much bandwidth to effectively convey even the simplest of marketing messages, these days cell phones, netbooks, and other low-end computers can process longer clips easily.

The uses for video on your business site are almost endless. Besides creating sales materials, you can also release instructional pieces that show your customers how to use and maintain your products, introductory clips that draw visitors deeper into your site, and even “viral” sketches that spread your brand quickly from one user to another.

3. A blog.

There aren’t many companies or self-employed professionals who haven’t at least tried blogging, and for good reason: blogs allow you to communicate with your customers informally while helping your search engine optimization efforts at the same time. To get the most out of yours, though, you need to do more than make the occasional post. Instead, make sure visitors can find it easily, and then post fresh content at least a few times a month. Blogging might not be new, but it’s still growing; you can’t afford to miss out on the benefits it can bring your business.

4. A newsletter or free giveaway.

Unless you work for an enormous company with nearly unlimited resources (and maybe even then), getting people to your site is probably expensive and time-consuming. Because of that, it’s imperative that your visitors not leave quickly.

By using blogs, video, and social media, you should be able to hold more of their attention than you have in the past. But don’t stop there – make it easy to follow up with them later. Studies have repeatedly shown that it usually takes several contacts to make the first sale to a new customer, and yet many marketers give up after the first try. Whether it’s a free e-book, special report, newsletter, or other promotion, make sure you’re not letting traffic slip away without gathering a bit of information; you work too hard at finding people not to come any closer to a buying relationship.

In web marketing, or any marketing for that matter, there aren’t many “must try” strategies; what works for one company might not make much sense for another. You should try putting these four into play on your website, though. None of them is difficult or expensive, and they can keep you from falling behind the competition as buyers come back to the market.

Web Accessibility in General

Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of web design. A company, organization, or individual who wants to have a website needs to consider having accessible content. In some fields like government and education to name a couple, they are required by law to have accessible websites.

So what does it mean to be accessible? Accessible to what? Accessibility is about making your content independent on a person’s abilities or disabilities. Regardless of a person’s physical or mental condition, they should be able to access your sites content.

Disabilities are categorized into four main areas:

• Visual
• Hearing
• Motor
• Cognitive

Accessibility Tool for Designers

WebAIM offers a tool called WAVE that evaluates a web page for accessibility issues. Not only do I use this tool personally on all of my projects, but I highly recommend it to others who have a concern for making their sites web accessible.

You can evaluate your website with WAVE one of two ways:

1. Download and install the Firefox WAVE toolbar.
2. Go to WAVE’s website

WAVE offers you a lot of tools to use at your disposal. You can check for errors, look at the structure and order of your site, see a text-only version, disable styles, and much more.

What is nice about checking for errors is that it visually shows you where the errors (if any) are coming from. This can make your design and development process much more efficient as you can pinpoint particular areas of concern.

There is not a greater feeling than to see WAVE give you the thumbs up and the green light on your design. Designers and developers should always be thinking about accessibility in their projects.

I encourage you to try this tool and avoid eliminating a valuable audience.

Firefox recently released Add-ons Collections to provide an easy way for users to share groups of related add-ons (also known as extensions) for their browser environment. This provides like-minded users the ability to share their collections of add-ons  similarly to the way Delicious enables users to share bookmarks.

The initial ABT Web Dev Collection consists of seven of the most essential add-ons in our web development arsenal. For this post we will highlight our current top five. From color sampling and screen grabbing to bug squashing and validating, this add-ons collection greatly improves our productivity and we hope you will find it beneficial.

Web Developer Toolbar

This add-on is considered a staple for web developers of all types. It’s the all-in-one solution where you can quickly disable styles, update CSS, and disable Javascript code. It gives you the ability to troubleshoot on the fly, where you can analyze or make changes to your source code and changes return immediately.

Firebug

Firebug’s developers have coined their add-on as “web development evolved” and we can’t agree more. Similar to the Web Developer Toolbar but different. It’s similar in the sense that you have access to all the same pieces to investigate, debug, etc. but it allows a WYSIWIG view of the inner workings of your web page. To list a few, you can: inspect and edit HTML, modify your CSS, monitor network activity, and quickly find errors.

HTML Validator

As web designers we all know and should strive for valid HTML markup. The HTML validator provides a quick and easy way for you just to do that. If you have error-free markup you get a nice green checkmark letting you know all is well. But if you have errors or warnings it will tell you exactly where in your markup you need to review. Having valid HTML helps contribute to better SEO rankings, browser rendering, and to future-proof your site.

Operator

If you are a web designer and have no idea what microformats are you better get to learning. Put simply, “microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” (Source: microformats.org) Microformats help us speak the same language when it comes to standards and as we move towards a semantic web (where we can search for topics  in a question format rather than keyword format) they will become a requirement. Operator gives you the ability to leverage and debug microformats. This is a necessary add-on as you are learning how to properly apply microformats.

ColorZilla

Do you need to quickly create a palette from a web image? Then ColorZilla is your add-on. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser using an eyedropper tool. In addition you can add colors to your favorites, page zoom, easily adjust colors and paste into another program. A must-have for any web designer.

Be sure to download the new Mozilla Firefox Add-on Collector and then subscribe to our ABT Web Dev Collection to keep up to date with our tried and true collection of add-ons. As we come across other add-ons that we just can’t live without, we’ll add to our collection so you can stay on top of your web development.